16. 'Theatre of War: WW1 battlefields - Ypres, Somme, Vimy' (2014) by Mo Sandford FRPS (1953- )

 

In 2014, East Devon, in common with communities all over the world, saw many projects marking the centenary of the outbreak of WW1.  In Budleigh, the town's Fairlynch Museum staged an exhibition entitled 'The Great War at Fairlynch'. 

Photographer and Budleigh resident Mo Sandford, better known by her married name of Bowman for the work she has done for the East Devon-based Otter Valley Association, created her own project on World War One battlefields of the Western Front.

Battlefields like Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele were, it seems, besieged by war widows in the 1920s, searching for explanations. 'They found only ruins, and left without answers', she wrote in the introduction to her project. It was entitled 'Theatre of War: WW1 battlefields - Ypres, Somme, Vimy'.

She found that her 35-year-long project  had deep personal origins.  As a child she recalled her father weeping while he watched on a flickering television screen the 1960s documentary series ‘The Great War’.  

Her mother recalled the 'smouldering moods' of her own father and brutal scenes of domestic violence. Mo’s grandmother was beaten by her husband, 'bounced around the kitchen, wall by wall'. Yet he never spoke of The War, she says. 'I wondered if other old soldiers were the same, never speaking, just re-enacting with a punch-bag.'

Theatre of War has three sections: the first consists of 171 colour photos followed by 114 monochrome images. A final section is made up of 13 conclusions in photomontage, some of them serving to voice the artist’s own message.  ‘Ypres Cloth Hall revisited’ shows the magnificently rebuilt medieval Flemish landmark in colour as it stands today contrasted with the monochrome scenes of bandaged soldiers among the ruins. But some of the soldiers are laughing, as though all the devastation and the suffering inflicted on them by the Great War had been an absurd joke.

Many of the colour photos are of massive structures such as the Thiepval Memorial, erected to commemorate fallen victims of the Somme with no known grave.   

Others, like the clever shot of screw pickets in a field of wildflowers, hint at the horror of the barbed wire which formerly scarred the landscape, trapping many wounded soldiers.  

The monochrome images seem to convey deliberately wintry scenes, as though presenting monuments frozen in time.

This image of Fricourt in the Somme département is one of twenty showing German cemeteries. 17,000 are buried here.

One of the Fricourt images, showing a Jewish headstone amongst the Christian crosses, seems to stand as a lone voice in protest against the Holocaust.  For Mo, the 1914-18 conflict, like any other, was a human tragedy from which all nations should learn lessons. 

Above: The Kroonart Kemmel Trench Museum in the Ypres Salient

Her photos reflect her view of the Flanders landscapes as killing-fields capable of maiming and destroying a century later: they yield harvests of shells and bombs, still live in some cases, and occasionally unburied bones.  

But she has a deep affection for the area and its people. “My pictures portray the Western Front in a time before tourists trampled the trenches smooth, and the impromptu field museums were still dusty,” she explains.  She is concerned about the way in which the fields that she views as sacred are being altered.

 

Above: The Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery

'Modern life is swamping the remains of the Western Front,' she believes. She reads with dismay of land-hungry developers: her photo of Hill 60 on the Messines Ridge is described as 'a fiercely fought over vantage point [...] still fighting today, with encroaching housing'. Yet, as she points out, there are local families with nowhere to live. 'Only the tranquil cemeteries seem unspoilt.' 

 

Soldiers of the Great War

Dancing with Death 

Images  ©  Mo Sandford FRPS 2014

https://www.mosandford.net